No, I haven't... And I walked with a bloke in Kruger the other day who had 650+ birds on his list and neither did he. He said that it was his bogey bird as he even live in close proximity to the area they are found in.

I was at Mtunzini last summer: turns out the bird has some degree of local movement in that it migrates south; transkei way. I dipped on it but made up for it with African Broadbill and Narina Trogon at Sobhengu on the Nibela Peninsula overlooking Lake St Lucia.

Latest Lifers: Brown-Backed Honeybird; Violet-Eared Waxbill; Green-Winged Pytilia; and heard often but never seen - Yellow-Fronted Tinkerbird (±2m away in the open)

This was #656 for me. Seen late in September just 30m off the boardwalk where it crosses over a bit of the St Lucia estuary, a second sighting within two months. The first time was in June when I went on a boat across the estuary to Honeymoon Bend where I had a very poor sighting of one.

These birds migrate to the coastal regions of KZN during their non-breeding season and to return again around September. This sighting corfirms that at least some of the Mangrove kingfishers are still around the esturine habitats of Natal as late as end September. From October to March they will be in the forests of the Transkei and northern parts of the eastern Cape where they will breed.

Total South African population estimate is around 200. Their quiet, inactive habit in the non-breeding season makes this a very tough bird to locate, hence it often becomes the last kingfisher one sees to complete a full house...

I was very fortunate that one of my mates, Jonathan Sykes spotted the bird there the previous day and alerted me to it. It took one helluva effort to eventually see it, sludging through calf deep mud and eventually sitting on a washed out tyre feeling sorry for myself for 45minutes with the bird calling 5m away from me without me getting a view of it. Eventually the darn thing realized that my will was stronger than his and he flew past me and sat in the most impossible place to photograph it. So once again, sludging through the mud I had to lean against a mangrove to get as much as possible of the bird in the view finder.

As I got back to the car it was sitting out in the open on top of the mangroves taunting me. I hope it got heartburn from the crabs it was catching. Bloody bird!

It took weeks to get that mud off my skin. It goes straight into your pores and I had to duck tape parts of my legs and feet to compression sweat the mud from the non covered parts out. And then pulling off the tape to pull the rest out.